93rd Academy Awards: The 2021 Oscar Prediction Post

Estimated Reading Time: 3 hours 47 minutes 22 seconds

The Academy Awards are once again upon us and the biggest question about them is…does anyone give a rat’s ass?

As the show’s dwindling ratings prove, interest in the once mighty Oscars has been in steep decline in recent years. It would seem the perfect storm of a plethora of streaming service tv shows and reduced attention spans, as well as a paucity of genuine movie stars and a plenitude of identity politics has wounded, maybe fatally, the once iconic awards.

As a denizen of Hollywood, I’ve never experienced an awards season that has generated so little interest. It appears that even though, due to streaming services, movies are more available to more people than ever before, they seem to have never mattered less.

Part of the reason for that is that, for a vareity of reasons - not the least of which was Covid, 2020 was just a cinematically lackluster year. A handful of good movies came out this year, but no truly great ones, and certainly no films that ignited the public’s passions.

With that said, the reality is that it is my sworn and solemn obligation to share with you my Oscar picks. Please remember that these picks are NOT TO BE USED FOR GAMBLING PURPOSES!!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Who will win: Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari) - Not a fan of this movie or this performance, but it checks a diversity box Academy members want to celebrate. I personally think Amanda Seyfried (Mank), Olivia Colman (The Father) and Maria Bakalove (Borat) are considerably more deserving. There’s an outside chance Bakalove pulls the upset…but don’t bet on it.

Who should win: Seyfried or Colman.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Who will win: Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) - This is a slam dunk, and deservedly so. While I liked Paul Raci (Sound of Metal) and LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah), Kaluuya crushes his role as Fred Hampton.

Who should win: Kaluuya

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Who will win: Promising Young Woman - Emerald Fennel : This is one of the few interesting categories. I think Fennel wins because the Academy is desperate to to appease the woke wolves at its door, and Fennel is a woman so she qualifies. There’s a pretty good chance that they give the award to Aaron Sorkin for his atrocious The Trial of the Chicago 7. That movie is dreadful and the script a joke, but it taps into the whole self-righteousness of the moment. That said…I think Fennel gets the nod.

Who should win: Sound of Metal - Darius Marder

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Who will win: Nomadland - Chloe Zhao: I think Zhao and Nomadland are the big winners come Oscar night…but if Florian Zeller wins this award (which I think he should) for his adaptation of The Father, it could be a monkey wrench into the Nomadland dominance.

Who should win: The Father - Florian Zeller

ANIMATED FEATURE

Who will win: Soul. This is a no-brainer. I liked Soul and it is certainly an antidote to our tumultuous times. Also…the Pixar machine is unstoppable.

Who should win: Soul I guess.

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Who will win: Mank - I think Mank finally gets on the board here. if it loses this category it may very well get shut out of all awards. The big competition will come from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Who should won: Mank.

COSTUME DESIGN

Who will win: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - I think Ma Rainey and its popular costume crew win here for a variety of non-merit based reasons. If Mank wins, which it could, that is a big deal and could portend a mini-Mank run in some behind the camera categories.

Who should win: Mank.

MAKEUP AND HAIR

Who will win: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Same as above.

Who should win: Mank.

EDITING

Who will win: Sound of Metal - There’s a chance that Trial of the Chicago 7 could win (God help us), but I think Sound of Metal pulls it off. If Nomadland win then look out, that is a sign it will win a huge amount of hardware on Oscar night.

Who should win: Sound of Metal

SOUND

Who should win: Sound of Metal - Outside chance that Mank or Soul win, but that seems very unlikely. if Mank wins it is another sign of a big night for that movie…but that seems unlikely.

Who should win: Sound of Metal

VISUAL EFFECTS

Who will win: Tenet - This seems like it’s going to happen.

Who should win: I’ll be honest…I don’t know.

SCORE

Who will win: Soul - Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: This seems like a slam dunk too. An outside chance Terence Blanchard wins for his bombastic score to the equally awful Da 5 Bloods.

Who should win: Soul.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Who will win: My Octopus Teacher - I’m not sure why but people love this movie and I think the votes for potential winners Collective, Crip Camp and Time get split and the octopus wins.

Who should win: No idea.

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Who will win: Another Round - I think this beats out Qou Vadis, Aida by a nose.

Who should win: Another Round.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Who will win: Nomadland - This is a bellwether award…if everything goes to plan then Nomadland should win and clean up at the Oscars. If Mank wins…its gonna be an interesting night because that signals Mank has a ground swell of support and Nomadland is floundering.

Who should win: Mank. Nomadland is extremely well shot by Joshua James Richards, no doubt about it, but my tastes run slightly more towards Erik Messerschmidt and Mank.

BEST ACTOR

Who will win: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) - This is set in stone. With Boseman’s tragic death and the narrative around the award, it would be an absolute shocker of the highest order if anyone else won. The only other potential winner is Anthony Hopkins for The Father…but that ain’t happening.

Who should win: Anthony Hopkins. Boseman is very good in Ma Rainey…but Hopkins is on another level in The Father.

BEST ACTRESS

Who will win: Viola Davis - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom : This is one of the very few interesting categories. Frances McDormand is the front runner but I think that the fact that she won recently (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and a win here would put her in Meryl Streep territory with 3 Oscar wins, the Academy will look to feed the diversity beast by awarding Davis for her sub-par performance in that dreadful movie.

Who should win: Carey Mulligan - Promising Young Woman : I thought Mulligan was better than everybody else.

BEST DIRECTOR

Who will win: Chloe Zhao - Nomadland : This too is a slam dunk. No way Fincher or Vinterberg pull of an upset. Just impossible.

Who should win: Fincher, Vinterberg or Zhao. Three different directors making very different films all did solid work.

BEST PICTURE

Who will win: Nomadland - This is happening. There is no stopping the Nomadland juggernaut. If Mank or (GOD HELP US ALL) The Trial of the Chicago 7 win, that is a sure sign of the apocalypse.

Who should win: Mank or Sound of Metal. They won’t win but I think they should. Nomadland is a good movie, but I thought these two were a little better.

Here’s the rest of the categories of which I have no opinion just a guess…

ORIGINAL SONG- One Night in Miami

LIVE ACTION SHORT - Two Distant Strangers

DOCUMENTARY SHORT - Concerto is Conversation

©2021

The Father and the Media's Dementia Simulation Machine

The Oscar-nominated The Father is a masterful film about living with dementia…and a reminder that the mainstream media is a dementia simulation machine.

The film immerses viewers in the confusion of dementia – the same sort of bewilderment caused by US media misinformation to disorient the public and make them easier to control and manipulate. 

The Father is a terrific movie that tells the story of an aging man struggling with dementia, and it has left me rattled as it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the delusional and disorienting nature of American life.  

The film is rightfully nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards as it showcases a superb performance by Anthony Hopkins who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his stellar work.

What makes The Father such a poignant and insightful film is that director Florian Zeller doesn’t just show the effects of dementia on the screen, he immerses the audience in the excruciating experience of dementia.

Watching the film and experiencing that disease-imposed confusion, I couldn’t help but think about how, here in the U.S. at least, it feels as if our entire culture is suffering from a collective dementia. The disorientation and detachment from reality that come with that dreaded disease are entirely commonplace in America, where we seem incapable of remembering the past, or of clearly seeing the present.

This rapacious American dementia is fueled first and foremost by the mainstream media’s manipulation and misinformation.

The establishment media have long distorted reality in order to manufacture consent around a desired narrative. This is why Americans always see themselves as the “good guys” on the world stage and not as the imperialist aggressors and colonialist exploiters that we are.

For proof just look at the flag-waving coverage surrounding the Iraq war and the WMD nonsense, or the egregious media assaults on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden compared to the genuflecting coverage of infamous bs artists like Chris Kyle, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

This duplicitous media approach can often be so blatant as to be ridiculously absurd, such as when CNN described the rioting, looting and arson last Summer as “mostly peaceful” protests.

The same is true regarding the current wave of anti-Asian violence. The media blame the attacks on the ever-expanding yet conveniently amorphous label of “white supremacy”, but the videos and statistics regarding these repugnant attacks against Asians show black people are the majority of perpetrators, a fact the media steadfastly fail to mention.

Another dementia-like distortion caused by the media is the perception that police are killing black people en-masse.

As a 2021 Skeptic Research Poll found, most Americans greatly over-estimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police.

When asked “How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”, 53.3 % of those self-described as “very liberal” estimated that over 1,000 unarmed black men had been killed by police, even though the actual number is believed to be between 60 – 100.

According to the same study, 24.9% of people killed by police are black, yet those self-describing as “liberal” or “very liberal” estimated the number to be 56% and 60% respectively.

This detachment from reality is no shock as according to a Gallup poll over half the country already over-estimates the size of the black population in general, believing it to be over 30% when in reality it is roughly 14%.

The over-estimation of police killings of unarmed black men is to be expected as every killing of a black person by the police or by a white person results in massive media coverage and a declaration that the only motivation for the incident is racism. In contrast the deaths of white people at the hands of police or by black perpetrators are not considered noteworthy.

The anti-Russia hysteria is another establishment media manufactured narrative that is directly at odds with reality, but that is deeply rooted in the American psyche.

Russiagate, hacking of electrical grids, using super-secret microwave weapons to attack U.S. diplomats, and putting bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, are just a few of the dominant pieces of anti-Russian disinformation devoid of fact that the media tout as gospel truth.

The immigration crisis is another bewildering story disorienting Americans. The media vehemently chanted the mantra “kids in cages” when Trump detained children at the border, but were silent when Obama did the exact same thing during his presidency. And now that Biden is doing it too, the media are back to downplaying its significance or ignoring it entirely.

And of course, the most perplexing media coverage surrounds the coronavirus. Originally the press excoriated anyone who raised the notion that the disease may have come from a lab in China, but now the truth that they aren’t sure where it initially came from is acknowledged.

The medical establishment is just as perfidious and deceitful as the media.

For example, Dr. Fauci knowingly lied early in the pandemic about the need for masks.

And last Summer a collection of medical professionals said that no large groups should gather, except for Black Lives Matter protests, making the obscene and absurd claim that the media manufactured “epidemic” of racism was just as bad as the coronavirus pandemic.  

In addition, concerns over vaccinations are broken down by race, with white concerns stigmatized and black concerns gently understood.

Just like dementia, this insidious media and medical duplicity creates stress, irritability and aggression among the populace.

In conclusion, The Father is a masterful film insightfully exploring the tragedy of dementia, and the hypocritical, pernicious, frivolous and mendacious establishment media are a relentless dementia simulation machine. The former is worth indulging, the latter is terminal and should be avoided at all costs.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

The 'Roll Up Your Sleeves' Vaccination Variety Hour!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

NBC’s vapid vax propaganda ‘Roll Up Your Sleeves’ was entirely ineffective in restoring faith in the medical establishment

Sunday’s star-studded TV special starring the Obamas and Hollywood A-listers did its best to persuade people to get the Covid jab. But it spurned seriousness in favor of woke posturing and self-serving virtue signaling.

Last night, NBC aired a one-hour special titled Roll Up Your Sleeves, which was meant to inform viewers and inspire them to get a Covid vaccination.

The show, which was ‘presented’ by drug store behemoth Walgreens, was the most inane and insulting of infomercials. Wedged between a cavalcade of drug commercials for various medical ailments, from bi-polar disorder to migraines to eczema, numerous Hollywood celebrities, politicians and ‘medical professionals’ used stilted conversations and dead-eyed monologues to urge viewers to take the “safe and effective” vaccine in order to get back to their “family and friends”.

Instead of convincing me to get the vaccination, this insipid piece of propaganda that kept endlessly repeating the mantra “safe and effective” left me wanting to stick needles into both of my eyes.

My biggest question regarding Roll Up Your Sleeves is who in the hell – besides some sorry son of a bitch like me – is actually watching this piece of garbage? I mean, no one in their right mind watches network television anymore and of the sad souls who do, are they really going to watch an hour of a high school health class level of medical advocacy?

The show opened with Michelle Obama, Faith Hill, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the power couple Russell Wilson and Ciara chatting unnaturally on Zoom together. After some limp back and forth, Michelle Obama turned the evening over to Wilson and Ciara, who hosted from a TV studio made over to look like… a club in a TV studio.

I like Russell Wilson as a football player. But as a TV host, he seems like he’s received one too many hits to the head, and Ciara is a beauty but quite the annoying piece of arm candy. These two bland buffoons were like if Donny and Marie had gotten charisma bypass surgery.

One of the evening’s lowlights was when Matthew McConaughey ‘interviewed’ Dr. Anthony Fauci. McConaughey turned the smarm up to 11 and had his hair greased back and wore tinted glasses for the Zoom occasion.

The interview consisted of the sweaty McConaughey sneering at anyone who could doubt the vaccine, as he asked Fauci the questions people might have such as “are there long-term side effects to the vaccine?”

Fauci answered “No!” and greasy McConaughey gave his million-dollar smile and moved on to the next propaganda talking point.

If this exchange was meant to ease anxieties around the vaccine, it failed miserably. Having some vapid, Hollywood clown who looks like a second-rate used car salesman pitch softballs to a known liar like Fauci isn’t going to convince anyone but those already of like mind.

The rest of the seemingly endless hour was just as ineffective for the cause of getting people to take the vaccination.

Besides shilling for the vaccine, there was also a lot of talk about racism and the history of medical professionals mistreating black people, who were definitely the target audience for the show.

Barack Obama came on and discussed past medical racism with Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley, but reiterated that things have changed and that “black and brown” people should trust the “safe and effective” vaccine.

Actor Sterling K. Brown later did the same, but he couched his impassioned argument around the fact that black doctors and scientists have always been at the forefront of vaccinations and that a black woman had been integral in developing the “safe and effective” Covid vaccine.

There was even a completely incongruous segment in the show about the recent spike in anti-Asian violence that had nothing to do with the “safe and effective” vaccine at all.

That said, there was one less-than-subtle appeal to whites, which came in the form of former NASCAR driver Dale Jarrett saying people need to get vaccinated so they can go to the races again. I am sure this was incredibly appealing to the hordes of rednecks tuning in to a woke vaccination special on NBC on a Sunday night.

The show did try to be intentionally funny a few times too, but not surprisingly never actually succeeded.

Actor Kumail Nanjiani did a cringe-worthy ‘kids say the darndest things’ type segment and comedian Wanda Sykes came on to tell what were supposed to be jokes. It seemed as though they had both been “safely and effectively” vaccinated against being funny.

The bottom line regarding Roll Up Your Sleeves is that it wasn’t actually designed to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with it and it will not be effective in getting people to take the allegedly “safe and effective” vaccine.

The Walgreens Propaganda Hour featuring thirsty celebrities and bloviating politicians is just not going to restore people’s lost faith in medical professionals.

Fauci and his ilk spent the last year mortgaging their own integrity and hemorrhaging their own authority. You can’t lie about the necessity for masks, like Fauci originally did, or tell people that they must isolate at home, unless it is to go to Black Lives Matter rallies, and expect anyone to believe a word you say.

The vaccine may very well be “safe and effective”, but Fauci and his Hollywood and Washington snake oil salesman are not trustworthy advocates, and no slapdash variety hour is going to change that fact.

A version of this artivle was originally published at RT.

©2021

Exterminate All the Brutes: A Documentary Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A pretentious disappointment.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it feels like to be stuck on a four-hour flight sitting next to a rambling, drunken college student who just read their first book about colonialism, genocide and white supremacy and mistakenly thinks they have some profound insights, have I got a documentary series for you…

Exterminate all the Brutes is the new unconventional, four-part docu-series from filmmaker Raoul Peck now available on HBO and HBO Max that explores the vast history of colonialism, genocide and white supremacy from a non-white and non-European perspective.

The documentary is based on the books Exterminate all the Brutes (Sven Lindqvist), An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) and Silencing the Past (Michel-Rolph Trouillot), and chaotically mixes documentary footage, home movies, popular films, animation, and fictional scripted scenes to create a sort of experimental, impressionistic cinematic essay instead of a straight forward documentary.

Exterminate All the Brutes, a phrase which comes from Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness, highlights the greatest hits of horror in the history of humanity and is divided into four parts titled, “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance”, “Who the F*ck is Columbus?”, “Killing at a Distance”, and “The Bright Colors of Fascism”.

From Europeans explorers, to the plundering of Africa and the slave trade, to the eradication of the Native American population, to Hitler, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima, the documentary leaves no stone of brutality, barbarity and white supremacy left unturned.

The series attempts to tie together the genocide of the American Indians, slavery and the Holocaust in order to expose the unique evil of white supremacy and its impact on modern Western civilization.

The writer and director Raoul Peck, who’s documentary on James Baldwin, I am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017, should be applauded for his ambition on Exterminate All the Brutes, but certainly not his execution. Ultimately, in his attempt to create a profound, personalized poem, Peck instead produces a painfully pretentious polemic.

The series is not so much thorough as it cluttered, and while it has a specific topic, it is devoid of a distinct thesis. I would probably agree with Peck’s argument regarding colonialism if I could actually discern what exactly it was. As a result of this lack of a detailed thesis, the documentary comes across as a distracted, incoherent, stream of consciousness diatribe fueled by an adolescent, if not infantile, intellectualism. It feels more like a tantrum resulting from deep frustration and helplessness than a dissertation born out of intense study.

Peck’s journey into the heart of darkness of colonialism, slavery and genocide may very well be a noble venture but it is also egregiously narcissistic. Peck not only tells you what he knows but endlessly recites how and from whom he came to know it.

Peck also vents his rage at individuals he dislikes, like Donald Trump, and groups he despises, like the Scots-Irish…boy does he have a bug up his ass about the Scots-Irish.

Peck’s anger also distorts his argument as he makes contradictory statements regarding his flawed premise. For instance, he brushes aside the “Guns, Germs and Steel” hypothesis and calls early Europeans backward and uncivilized, but then describes that Europeans came to dominate African peoples simply because they were able to create advanced technology and weapons that Africans could not.  

The greatest flaw of the documentary though, and there are many, is that as it guides viewers through the history of white European atrocities, it never breaks new ground or reveals unearthed truths. Anyone with half a brain in their head is aware of the horrors of colonialism, slavery and genocide by now. The fact that the U.S. was born on the back of African slaves and the genocide of American Indians isn’t exactly breaking news. But as Peck himself states in the film, “it is not knowledge that we lack”, which begs the question…if we don’t lack knowledge then what is the purpose of this four-hour monstrous mess of a docu-series?

Peck is also his own worst enemy as a storyteller as he narrates the series and his voice-over is, without exaggeration, the worst in the history of the spoken word. Never has someone talked so much (and so inaudibly) and said so little. Peck’s droning, garbled voice isn’t helped by the insipid platitudes he mutters like “neutrality is not an option” and “there are no alternative facts”.

That sort of overwrought emotionalism and intellectual vapidity is the life-blood of Exterminate All the Brutes. This is most evident in the cringe-inducing and laughably ludicrous scripted dramatic scenes haphazardly inserted throughout the series.

Actor Josh Hartnett is tasked with playing the embodiment of white supremacy and white privilege throughout history in the series of amateurish scenes, and his performance entails shooting a lot of brown people in the head and looking menacingly at the ones he hasn’t killed.

These scenes, and the scenes from Peck’s earlier dramatic films also shown, reveal the director to be a middling-at-best filmmaker, and Exterminate All the Brutes seems to be a case of an artist and pseudo-intellectual biting off considerably more than he could ever possibly chew.

In conclusion, I watched Exterminate All the Brutes so that you don’t have to. And trust me…you don’t have to…you really don’t have to.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Coded Bias: Documentary Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. The film tackles a fascinating topic but is too narrow and shallow to be of much use.

Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya, explores how artificial intelligence algorithms propagate racial and gender bias.

Big tech totalitarianism is one of the most important issues of our time, and I’m on board with any film highlighting the inherent perils of over reliance on insidious technologies. But Coded Bias, while being somewhat informative, ultimately falls flat because its focus on race and gender is much too narrow.

The film sets out to show how artificial intelligence dehumanizes people and encodes racial bias into the job, college, mortgage and loan application process as well as the criminal justice system, but this misses the techno-tyranny forest for the trees and is akin to complaining about a lack of art by people of color on the walls of the Titanic.

MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini opens the movie by recounting how she discovered racial bias in facial recognition software and then documents her attempts to combat it with her collection of activists named the Algorithm Justice League (AJL).

Buolamwini makes for a compelling protagonist on this journey into the Orwellian hellscape of artificial intelligence due to her superior knowledge of the subject matter and magnetic personality.

Equally compelling is the disturbing information about the totalitarian use of algorithms by the Chinese government to control their populace through a social credit system and the U.K.’s baby steps down the same authoritarian path as it implements its own flawed facial recognition program.

Americans are under the same invasive surveillance and are imprisoned by a similar social credit system, the only difference being that they are unaware of it and it’s being done by big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

But these issues are painfully complex and Coded Bias is often at cross-purposes with itself when confronting them. For instance, the film highlights the Chinese and U.K. government’s draconian use of technology, but then spotlights activists demanding the American government assert itself more aggressively regarding oversight.  

The same is true when Buolamwini takes her racial bias study to IBM to show them that their facial recognition tech fails to adequately work on black faces. In response, the company fixes the problem, which results in…more black people being able to be put in facial recognition databases. This pyrrhic victory makes the AJL seem like controlled opposition.

In this way the AJL is reminiscent of Black Lives Matter, in that they’re really a grievance delivery system designed to divide people and distract them from the much bigger issue. The race and gender obsessed AJL, just like BLM, makes enemies of potential allies by refusing to see all victims as equal.

For example, the conservatives and “conspiracy theorists” that have been de-platformed by algorithms from Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube are not considered worthy victims of tech totalitarianism by the AJL (and are never mentioned in the movie), but these ‘deplorables’ could be powerful allies in the fight to rein in the Sauron of Silicon Valley.

In one scene Republican Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is aghast at the power and pervasiveness of the FBI’s extra-judicial facial recognition program. The AJL no doubt loath Jordan (an easy thing to do), but he could be an effective asset in attempting the Herculean task of restraining the tech behemoth.

In contrast to Jordan, in the same congressional hearing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignores deeper concerns and instead theatrically focuses her ire at the majority “demographic group” that writes the code for artificial intelligence…white males.

The arch-villains of big tech expanding their surveillance capabilities without the slightest thought to ethics or human rights makes the possibility and probability of a dystopian corporate and draconian governmental future (and present) extremely high, but the film and the AJL are simply incapable of moving beyond their slavish devotion to identity politics and their own biases against white men to focus on that truly horrifying bigger picture.

The reality is that artificial intelligence doesn’t just dehumanize black people, it dehumanizes all people, and any movement that fails to put that fact front and center is deserving of distrust if not disdain.

If the AJL were serious about stopping techno-tyranny they’d be fighting vociferously to restore every person’s right to privacy and freedom of speech, especially if that speech is ugly and hateful, and for the right of people to own their personal information and data, and to stop tech companies from collecting and selling that data, and to either shatter the tech monopolies into a million pieces or transform them into public utilities. But they aren’t serious and they don’t aggressively address any of those issues.

Coded Bias ends by recounting the true story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier in 1983 who defied technology during a missile scare and refused to launch a nuclear counter attack against the U.S. The film states that if the artificial intelligence of a Strangelovian “doomsday machine” were in charge, and not Petrov’s humanity, then the world would have been obliterated. This nod to individualism is a nice sentiment but rings hollow after 90 minutes of relentless identity politics. It’s also somewhat amusing since the heroic Petrov is a member of the dreaded white male demographic.

In keeping with the Dr. Strangelove metaphor, Coded Bias and the activists it spotlights unfortunately aren’t truly interested in fighting against big tech’s artificial intelligence “doomsday machine”, they just want to make sure the war room is diverse and inclusive enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

MLB Needs to Stop Playing Politics and Start Playing Better Baseball

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

This past weekend Major League Baseball announced it was pulling this season’s All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia because it believes a new voting bill recently passed in that state’s legislature is racist.

In a rather amusing coincidence, a poll came out the same day revealing that 34.5% of fans are watching fewer sports due to political and social messaging by leagues and players.

As the saying goes “Get Woke, Go Broke”, and the poll, done by YouGov/Yahoo News, robustly reinforces that mantra.

According to the poll, nearly half of all Americans changed their viewing habits in the wake of last summer’s social justice protests at sporting events, with 34.5% watching less and 11% watching more.

Apparently performative virtue signaling like kneeling during the anthem, adorning stadiums and arenas with “Black Lives Matter”, and millionaire NBA players wearing jerseys with such inanities written on the back as “Love Us”, “See Us” and “Group Economics” is a turn off to many people, imagine that.

As the YouGov/Yahoo news poll reveals, significant numbers of fans across the political spectrum are tuning out, with 19% of Democrats, 53% of Republicans and most importantly 38.6% of Independents, decreasing their sports consumption due to social justice and political advocacy at games.  

The television ratings for sports in 2020 reflect the poll results and the frustration many feel toward the constant sloganeering and political pandering.

In 2020 the ratings for the NBA Finals were down 49%, the Stanley Cup 61%, the NFL regular season 7% and the Super Bowl 9%, and the World Series was the least watched in history, down 32% from the previous low.

These numbers are certainly not solely due to sports going woke, but the mainstream media claiming the political/social justice shift in sports has nothing to do with the decline in viewership are whistling past the graveyard.

What makes MLB’s swift decision regarding moving the All-Star game so odd is that no one within the sport was asking for it. For instance, the MLB players association weren’t demanding action and none of the league’s high-profile stars had raised a protest flag over the new Georgia law.

Adding to the oddity of MLB’s decision is that interpretations of the bill in question vary wildly. Republicans claim the bill secures elections and expands voting opportunities and believe the bill is being misconstrued and distorted by Democrats in Washington.

Meanwhile Democrats are calling the bill “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” for among other reasons that it requires voters to provide photo I.D., which is amusing in the context of MLB’s social justice preening since the league itself demands fans show photo I.D. at will call ticket booths and to purchase beer in stadiums.

Considering the disparity of opinions on the Georgia bill and the fact that MLB’s viewership and attendance was already in a steady decline you’d think that they might be more wary of alienating a good portion of their fanbase, which skews older and white, over an issue the league seems to not know enough about.

The problem for sports leagues across the board is that watching sports has already devolved into a tortuous experience regardless of all the social justice posing and pandering.

The NBA is basically unwatchable. The game has deteriorated into a carnival of entitled primadonnas hurling up thirty-footers, incessantly bitching at refs and flopping so flagrantly that it would shame the most flamboyant of Italian soccer players.

Watching the NFL is now an absurd exercise in capitalism porn as games are reduced to one endless commercial break after another with minimal on-field action.  

MLB gameplay has become unbearable too, with contests resembling monotonous marathons of swing and miss and miss and miss again. Chicks may dig the long ball but they aren’t going to sit around four boring, strikeout filled hours on the hopes of seeing one.

Baseball has been hemorrhaging fans for decades because the game is just too slow for younger viewers with shorter attention spans. Is MLB signaling a woke corporate virtue by pulling the All-Star game from Atlanta going to turn that tide? No. But maybe moving the mound back a foot, implementing a pitch clock and outlawing defensive shifts might.

The truth is I don’t care about Georgia’s voting rules…you know why? I don’t live in Georgia. If Georgians don’t like the voting rules, then they can vote to change the legislature that passed these new rules. If the new voting rules are unconstitutional, then the courts will intercede. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

The bottom line is that I hate politics and I especially hate politics in sports. I hate the players kneeling during the national anthem just as much as I hate that they play the national anthem at games. I hate the militarization of sports with the fucking flyovers and honor guards and all that other militarized Nuremberg-esque nonsense just as much as I hate the woke preening by self-serving, millionaire morons on teams and in league offices.

Sports fans like me are simply exhausted by the endless hyper-politicization of everything in our culture and we look to sports to escape, not to be politically assaulted. MLB would be very wise to avoid playing politics any further and instead focus on fixing their ailing game and playing decent ball.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Godzilla vs Kong: Review and Commentary

****WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Popcorn Movie Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. If you love monster movies you should like this one. If you are ambivalent about monster movies then don’t waste your time.

Godzilla vs Kong, directed by Adam Wingard, made a big splash at the box office when it premiered internationally last weekend, and has generated a lot of attention in the U.S. as it opened on Wednesday in both theatres and on HBO Max.

The film, which stars Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry among many others, is a sequel to both Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), and is the fourth film in Legendary’s Monsterverse franchise which kicked off in 2014 with Godzilla.

I’m always interested in monster movies because they feature rich myths that express deeper truths regarding their time and place and are ripe with opportunities for insightful metaphor and allegory.

For instance, beginning with the first King Kong film in 1933, the Kong story was an allegory for colonialism and slavery, as he was stolen from his tropical homeland by outsiders and brought to America in chains and exploited for profit.

Cinematically born in post-war Japan by Toho Studios in 1954, Godzilla was a metaphor for the perils of atomic weapons and American imperialism, and the embodiment of nuclear age anxiety.

As the world has changed, so has the metaphorical meaning of the monsters. Kong has grown to represent, at least in American eyes, the U.S. He is a primate, warm blooded and big hearted, who is ferociously protective of those he loves, and Americans are delusional enough to see themselves and their nation in his good qualities.

Godzilla has transformed from being a lizard-brained menace to being a hero, and even the previous Legendary films Godzilla and King of the Monsters paint the cold-blooded beast as a guardian of humanity and environmental protector.

In this context, Godzilla vs Kong strikes me as an allegory about the transition from a uni-polar world with America the lone superpower to a multi-polar one where China and the U.S. are equals, with Godzilla representing China and its bid for global dominance and Kong the U.S. fighting to maintain its alpha standing.

The cinematic evidence supporting this thesis is that American favorite Kong is the main protagonist in the story, and that the U.S. military fights on Kong’s side when the monsters battle.

In a nod to China’s status and power, Godzilla proves his alpha dominance by forcing Kong to submit and also obliterates the U.S Navy when it defends Kong.

It’s also conspicuous that the moviemakers set the climactic battle between Kong and Godzilla in Hong Kong, which is a city which can simultaneously represent different things to the film’s two largest target audiences…China and the U.S.

To Americans, the Let’s Get it on In Hong Kong battle can be interpreted as Kong (U.S.A.) fighting for democracy against the tyranny of China. In China it can be interpreted as the city merely being collateral damage in the wider battle against the imperialism of the west.

Of course, with the film ending with both Kong and Godzilla saving face and being victorious, Hollywood is simply trying to kiss two asses at once and stay in the good graces of both China and the U.S. and their massive audiences.

Another interpretation could be that the third monster in the movie, Mecha-Godzilla, is supposed to be representative of the corporate titans of the tech world that are maneuvering to rule us all, and that Kong (U.S.A.) and Godzilla (China) must work together to stop the seemingly all-powerful globalist tech behemoth. Considering that the tech industry, the U.S. and Chinese government, and Hollywood are like the evil three-headed monster Ghidorah, and work in unison to horde profits, power and spread propaganda, this interpretation isn’t as compelling.

A more likely scenario is that I’m just reading way too much into the popcorn delivery system that is a mindless monster movie.

The bottom line is that as a piece of cinematic art, Godzilla vs Kong isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, but as a monster movie it’s entertaining, especially in contrast to the three Monsterverse films leading up to it which were decidedly disappointing.

Sure, the film gets bogged down in a bevy of exposition and entirely incomprehensible plots involving conspiracy theories, hollow earth and some corporate nefariousness, but all that tomfoolery fades away once the CGI creations start stomping the earth and beating the crap out of each other.

Thankfully the movie also eschews the emotional preening so prevalent in the earlier Legendary ventures and simply lets the monsters battle it out. And the big fights are well executed, proficiently filmed and efficiently choreographed for prime viewing of the carnage, something also lacking in the muddled visuals of previous Monsterverse movies.

As for the fights, my critique is that Kong is like former Heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder in that he is much too reliant on big right hands. Kong needs to develop and then utilize a jab to keep a short-armed in-fighter like Godzilla at bay. To Kong’s credit though he is a great closer with his signature double fisted beat down move.

Godzilla is just a monster…literally. Despite short arms he has a long and powerful tail that can cause serious damage when whipped, and of course boasts some of the deadliest atomic breath around. Godzilla is sort of like George Foreman before the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974…just a horrifyingly big, strong and brutal fighter.

The Godzilla-Kong fights are what everybody is tuning in to see, and while there weren’t enough of them for my taste…the ones that did happen were pretty good so I will take what I can get.

As for whether Godzilla vs Kong is good or its deeper meaning, the film business couldn’t care less, it just cares that the movie raked in $123 million from overseas markets in its opening weekend, a Covid era record.

This seems to indicate that the Hollywood beast is awakening from its Covid slumber and is prepared once again to slouch across the globe asserting its malign influence. The U.S. and Chinese governments will be thrilled to have their reliably pliable Hollywood propaganda monster back in the game.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. Not a great film by any stretch, and not as good as the original Borat, but it has some cringe-induced laughs and a gloriously balls to the wall performance from Maria Bakalova.

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm, directed by Jason Woliner and written by Sacha Baron Cohen and a cavalcade of others, is the sequel to the 2006 mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan. The new film once again documents intrepid foreign tv personality Borat as he journeys through America. The film stars Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat with a supporting turn from Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter.

Sacha Baron Cohen came to prominence in 2002 with Da Ali G Show , which showcased his distinct brand of cringe comedy . Cohen’s dim-witted Ali G convinced regular and famous people alike into taking his buffoonery seriously and it made for some hysterical moments.

Da Ali G Show also featured two other Cohen characters, Bruno, a gay Austrian fashionista, and the aforementioned Borat.

Cohen brought Borat to the big screen and reaped a box office bonanza in 2006 with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan, instantly becoming a cultural icon and meme generator. Cohen followed up that success with Bruno in 2009, which wasn’t as big a hit as Borat but still was a massive box office success.

Since 2009 Cohen has gone away from his signature mockumentary style cringe comedy and has tried to find success in more orthodox movies, both comedy and drama. That success has been somewhat elusive, in part because Cohen is so identified as being Borat. For instance, it is difficult to watch him star in the serious Netflix drama The Spy because you keep expecting him to do something inappropriate and say “niiiice!” Although things might be changing for Cohen as he was just nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his work, which I thought was atrociously bad, in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Regardless of all that, I was surprised that Cohen came out with a new Borat movie now. It seemed like both the Borat cultural moment had passed and that dredging it up would only further hamper Cohen’s attempt at becoming a “legitimate” actor.

So when Borat Subsequent MovieFilm premiered on Amazon Prime in October of 2020, I made no effort to watch it. After months of putting it off I have finally taken the plunge.

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm is not as good as the original Borat…but it will certainly satisfy those who have a taste for Sacha Baron Cohen’s particular brand of comedy.

The movie is a shameless piece of anti-Trump propaganda (which is probably why it is nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar - which is absurd), but just because it is propaganda doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. The movie is, at times, uproariously funny. The most remarkable thing about it though is that Sacha Baron Cohen is totally outshined in lunacy by his fearless co-star Maria Bakalova. Bakalova, who plays Borat’s maligned daughter Tutar Sagdiyev, is ferociously funny as she sheds all inhibitions and even leaves her famous co-star looking a bit shell-shocked.

Bakalova is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, which is unbelievable not because she is undeserving but because the subject matter of the film is so outrageous. What sets Bakalova apart is her unabashed courage at diving into the most absurd and often repulsive scenes. The father-daughter dance at the Dallas debutante ball is so horrifying as to be gloriously amazing, and if she wins the Oscar I hope she recreates that dance when receiving her statuette.

In terms of the propaganda power of the movie, it seems more cathartic than persuasive. I mean, if you loved Trump and watched the movie it wouldn’t change your mind. Liberals will adore the movie’s political perspective and will no doubt only have their beliefs further reinforced, which isn’t necessarily a healthy thing, but this is life in 21st Century America. With all that said, I must admit that the movie felt very dated me just five months post-election.

Oddly, some of the things that Cohen uses to attempt to show Trumpists as morons and monsters actually does the reverse but he and his target audience are probably too enraptured by their own self-righteousness to be aware enough to recognize it. For instance, Borat stays with two Trumper/MAGA hat wearing men during the pandemic and uses that opportunity to show how bigoted, close-minded and hateful they are…but all that is undermined by the fact that these supposed bigots actually took a foreigner in during a pandemic and are patient and respectful towards him and go to great lengths to help him out.

Of course it should be stated that it is doubtful any of the stuff filmed in the movie is actually real. Cohen’s mockumentary style is easily manipulated and “real” moments are few and far between. But with that said, the biggest scene in the movie, and the one that got the most attention, involves Rudy Giuliani in a hotel room with a young woman. As a former New Yorker who lived there under his reign and absolutely hates Giuliani with the fury of a thousand suns, I have to say that the “gotcha” moment in this scene feels contrived and cheap. Giuliani is certainly a liar, creep and scumbag, but to imply he was playing with himself or whipping his miniscule, aggressively impotent tiny pecker out is pretty hyperbolic.

The bottom line is that Sacha Baron Cohen’s outrageous comedic style is an acquired taste, and to be frank, I have acquired it. I didn’t love Borat Subsequent MovieFilm, but it did make me laugh out loud a bunch of times, and that ain’t nothing. The film is worth watching for the laughs and to enjoy watching Maria Bakalova devour every scene she inhabits.

If you like Da Ali G Show, Borat and Bruno, you’ll like Borat Subsequent MovieFilm…but if Cohen’s style is not your cup of tea, I recommend you don’t even attempt to take a sip of this raunchy, rancid and ridiculous brew.

©2021

Minari: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped venture that ultimately underwhelms.

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chung’s South Korean immigrant family as it tries to achieve the American dream in 1980’s Arkansas. The film, which stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung and Will Patton, has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Yeun) and Best Supporting Actress (Youn).

Having survived the slog of cinema that was 2020, where even the very best films of the year like Mank, Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah are not great films, I held out hope for Minari to ride in on a white horse and save this year of cinema from death by a thousand mediocrities.

Unfortunately, Minari is not up to the task.

Minari is not a terrible movie, but it is not a very good one either. It suffers from many flaws, most notable being it doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be and therefore ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

For example, in theory it has all the trappings of an arthouse movie but is so painfully conventional in execution it becomes devoid of interest and artistic credibility.

Minari is sort of like a working class Korean immigrant version of Marriage Story mixed with a culture clash/fish out of water/American Dream story, but it never successfully or even adequately tells any of those stories, preferring the approach of throwing everything into the stew yet creating no flavor.

A major flaw with the storytelling approach of Minari is that it has a generalized perspective, so there is no one particular protagonist to lead us through the story. Since Chung is writing auto-biographically, it would have been interesting to have his childhood perspective lead the way. But Chung seems incapable of the skill that would require, and therefore he halves the baby and spreads perspective around which saps the story of dramatic power.

Chung is also a rather unimaginative visual stylist, as Minari is a painfully flat film with sub-par framing and composition as well as a dull and stale color palette.

There are some interesting performances in the movie, most notably by Yeun and Will Patton of all people, but Chung’s lackluster direction is unable to contain these performances and therefore the drama dissipates even when the actors are running on all cylinders. Chung’s inability to break through the conventional leaves viewers detached and disinterested in the plight of these characters despite some skillful acting work.

Chung’s biggest failing though is as a writer, as he is incapable of trusting his audience with a pure arthouse experience and therefore sprinkles in narrative arcs and beats that are cookie-cutter conventionalities that fall dramatically flat. The contrast of this conventional story being wrapped in the deliberately paced trappings of an arthouse movie creates a frustrating movie decidedly at cross purposes with itself.

Ultimately, with the generalized perspective, the conventional narrative arcs and the tedious visual aesthetic, Minari feels like a bad tv drama more than a serious piece of cinema and Oscar contender.

As evidenced by the plethora of Oscar nominations and a stunning 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, Minari is being lauded as a phenomenal film. But it seems to me that this is wishful thinking rather than accurate analysis of the film on screen.

In the wake of last year’s stirring success of Parasite, a spectacular piece of filmmaking by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Minari has no doubt been given a boost among the critical elite in the hopes of bolstering “diversity and inclusion” and recreating Parasite’s stirring success.

In the flat earth society that is our culture, Parasite and Minari are in the same category despite having nothing in common except that they share the same language and ethnicity of director. This is absurd, but it is how our culture thinks and works, especially in the era of identity politics.

If Minari were the same story but centering around the struggles of some white family, critics would rightfully ignore it for the uninspired, middling movie that it is. The fact that mediocrities like Chung and Minari are nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay speaks to how precipitous the decline in the art of cinema has become and to the hyper-delusional nature of a film business glorifying “diversity and inclusion” instead of talent, skill and craftsmanship.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about Minari. It is an underwhelming and instantly forgettable film that is not deserving of any accolades or praise. If you want to see a mundane, middle-of-the-road movie, Minari is definitely for you.

©2021

The Trial of the Chicago 7: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Yikes. What an abysmal Sorkinian shitshow.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, recounts the story of the infamous prosecution of a group of famed anti-Vietnam war protestors arrested for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Among the star-studded ensemble are Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Mark Rylance and Frank Langella.

The film, which is streaming on Netflix, has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Sacha Baron Cohen).

The Trial of the Chicago 7 tells an extremely important story, but unfortunately, it is an abysmally crafted, relentlessly hackneyed shitshow of a movie.

One can only speculate as to why such an aggressively trite cinematic venture has been so well received.

Maybe people say they like this movie because they think this is the type of movie they’re supposed to like. In this way The Trial of the Chicago 7 is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in that It covers a “serious” historical topic meant to convey a noble truth about a current social political issue. Lincoln was a terrible movie too, but that didn’t stop critics from fawning over it during their Obama sugar high. It was like critics endorsed the film in an attempt to avoid seeming to be against the abolition of slavery - as inane as that sounds.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like baby boomer porn where Sorkin and his fellow boomers can signal their historic virtue all over themselves in a frantic fit of masturbatorial self-righteousness. The film allows the auto-erotic boomer fantasy to extend to current issues and protests movements like Black Lives Matter, with climax no doubt gushing forth accompanied by an orgasmic cry of “right side of history!”

Regardless (or as Dictionary.com would now say - ‘irregardless’) of why it is being praised, it is definitely being praised. At the website Rotten Tomatoes the film currently has a 90% critical score and a 91% audience score.

It is at times like these that I feel the world has officially lost its mind. .

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is so cinematically cliched, dramatically defective and pretentiously pedantic it feels like a two hour and ten minute SNL skit.

The film boasts some of the most embarrassing acting of the year. Sacha Baron Cohen is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor for his work as 60’s icon Abbie Hoffman. Cohen looks like a dad who dressed up in in a bad hippie costume to accompany his kids to a Halloween dance. It is painfully embarrassing watching the 49 year old Cohen play acting as the 30 year-old Hoffman. Adding to the suck is the fact that Cohen absolutely tears limb from limb Hoffman’s unique New England accent, and ends up sounding like Borat, a Brooklynite, Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and a posh Brit all rolled into one giant acting shit sandwich.

Eddie Redmayne is just as dreadful as Tom Hayden. Redmayne is a charisma-less acting vampire that drains every scene of even the most remote bit of life. He too mauls an American accent like a newly freed Vegas tiger seeking revenge on his life-long tormentors Siegfried and Roy.

Even Mark Rylance, the great Mark Rylance, churns out a sub-par performance. Rylance plays the iconic civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who was one of the great New York characters of all-time. Rylance’s Kunstler is so far removed from any version of reality as to be criminal. Rylance too never properly wields Kunstler’s distinctive New York dialect. But as my friend Mo Danger pointed out, to Rylance’s credit he at least seems like the only actor in the cast not in on the Sorkinian joke.

The Trial of the Chicago 7’s biggest problem though is the direction of Aaron Sorkin, who simply lacks the requisite cinematic skill to take on such sprawling and complex subject matter.

Sorkin’s ham-fisted, hit-all-the-bullet-points, broad brush, watered down approach drains the dynamic story of any dramatic power. His limp direction also leaves his actors floundering, unable to piece together performances with any dramatic coherence.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like a very special episode of Sorkin’s 90’s remake of Fantasy Island …The West Wing. It is so self-reverential, pandering and dramatically flaccid as to be egregiously cinematically inept.

The piece de resistance of The Trial of the Chicago 7 is that it builds to a cinematic climax where people unironically stand and clap in a courtroom. It’s like Sorkin went all meta and made a movie set in the 1960’s that had the dramatic sensibilities of a high school drama from the 1980’s.

The story of the Chicago 7 is one that needs to be told…maybe in a Netflix mini-series so as to give each character more depth and the conflagration in Chicago in 1968 more context. The Trial of the Chicago 7 fails to adequately recount the time, place, events and characters involved in one of the crazier and more dangerous times in American history, and that failure is entirely on Aaron Sorkin.

My advice is to either skip The Trial of the Chicago 7 or go all in and just hate watch the damn thing, because it is certainly a target rich environment for scorn and cathartic loathing. Either way, this movie is a blight on the cinema landscape and can’t be forgotten soon enough.

©2021

Netflix's The Dig is not a White Supremacy Rallying Cry

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Netflix’s The Dig is a movie about a famous archeological discovery, not a pro-Brexit, white supremacist rallying cry

Only a woke academic could find hidden villainy in this perfectly benign and mildly pleasant British film. 

The Dig is a Netflix film starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James that dramatizes the 1939 excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo that transformed our understanding of the history of early medieval England.

The film, directed by Simon Stone and written by Moira Buffini, has been nominated for five BAFTAs including for Outstanding British Film.

But not everyone is so enamored of the movie, as some see it as a pro-Brexit film espousing white supremacy.

Louise D’Arcens, a Professor of English at Macquarie University in Australia, recently attacked the film because it commits the cultural sin of  “nostalgically appealing” and “romanticizing” an “imagined continuity between Anglo-Saxons and modern British people that does not speak to the complexity of Britain today.” The horror!

D’Arcens complains the film “re-animates key tropes from the persistent British and American ideology of Anglo-Saxonism”, which she claims “was vital to underwriting white racial supremacy as a mandate for Britain’s imperial power and the expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny…”

When viewed through this distorted lens, The Dig transforms from a tame historical drama/love story into a nefarious Brexit propaganda film surreptitiously waving an ‘England for the English!’ banner.

I didn’t see any white supremacy or Brexit sub-text in The Dig, but rather an utterly banal, benign and innocuous movie examining the universality of life, death and the impermanence of things.

The Dig is one of those proficiently shot, well-acted British dramas with which we’ve become so accustomed. It isn’t great and it isn’t awful. It’s fine. It’s a middlebrow piece of entertainment geared toward Anglophiles who’ve already devoured Downton Abbey and are looking to satiate their taste for all things British.

Not surprisingly, there are numerous contradictions and illogical observations in D’Arcens’ misguided analysis.

For instance, a major narrative in the film is about class struggle. Protagonist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) is a self-taught, working class excavator from Suffolk, who is hired by wealthy landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). Their budding relationship must navigate the suffocating class structures of the time period.

The class narrative is also highlighted when Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), a pompous archeologist from the British Museum, invades Sutton Hoo, belittles Basil and ultimately takes credit for his tremendous discovery.

Yet D’Arcens interprets the Phillips-Basil clash as not being about class but rather “highlighting ongoing tensions between Britain’s rural counties and its metropolitan centre” with rural meaning pro-Brexit/bad and metropolitan anti-Brexit/good.

This assessment seems oddly regressive as it lionizes the elite (Phillips) and vilifies the working class (Basil).

D’Arcens also bemoans the film “drawing uncritically on a historical tropes of expansionism – despite the fact the violence of colonialism and occupation is well understood today.”

This is directly at odds with the disparaging appraisal of Basil as a bad guy avatar for Brexiteers. Basil is the victim of the colonialism of educated metropolitan Philips. Like countless British colonialist before him, Phillips comes to Basil’s “foreign” land of Suffolk, takes power, steals treasures and brings them back to London. Yet, incongruously in D’Arcens’ deconstruction Phillips is also a heroic symbol of anti-Brexit sophistication.

D’Arcens then writes,

“One of the great reckonings in the film comes when Basil’s wife, May, urges her disaffected husband to return to the dig. She tells him:

 ‘You’ve always said your work isn’t about the past or even the present. It’s for the future, so that the next generations can know where they came from. The line that joins them to their forebears.’

This appeal to the idea of genetic continuity is rousing and profound, but also exclusionary and insular. May assumes racial and cultural uniformity in Britain, and shared forebears for all.”

Good lord, this is in no way an appeal to “genetic continuity” or an assumption of “racial uniformity”.

A major storyline in the film is that WWII is about to begin and the survival of Britain is at stake. This isn’t about genetic continuity or racial uniformity because the ethnogenesis of Anglo-Saxons developed between migrant Germanic tribes that came to the island back in the 5th century and indigenous Britons, thus Germans conquering Britain is not a genetic or racial threat. Hell, the royal family has German bloodlines.

The existential crisis facing Britain in the film is not a racial or genetic one, it is a national one as it is their (multi-racial) nationality that will disappear if the Germans prevail, not their race or genetic line.

D’Arcens continues, “(May) speaks to the film’s 21st century viewers, many of whom would not see an unearthed Saxon as a forebear, and might rightly wonder what “future generations” the film has in mind for Britain.”

If multi-cultural 21st century Brits, regardless of their race or ethnicity, don’t acknowledge a centuries dead Saxon king as a forebear for their nation, that says more about their historical ignorance and ethnic arrogance than anything else.

D’Arcens closes by lamenting, “…as cinematic archeology (The Dig) looks far more to the past than to the future.”

Considering The Dig is a movie set in the past and tells the story of characters discovering an even older past, this is an incredibly inane climax to a wholly inadequate analysis.

In conclusion, The Dig is not a great movie, but it also isn’t a dangerous one. It’s a mildly pleasant film that will most definitely not turn you into a brutish Brexiteer or Anglo-Saxon supremacist…I promise.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Q: Into the Storm - Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

The new HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm is just like QAnon in that it is vapid entertainment selling itself as truth

The documentary mini-series seeks to uncover the identity of Q instead of asking the more intriguing question of why the QAnon conspiracy appeals to so many.

Q: Into the Storm is the new HBO documentary miniseries that explores the QAnon conspiracy theory and the collection of people mixed up in it.

The first two episodes of the six-part series, produced and directed by Cullen Hoback, premiered on HBO and HBO Max Sunday night. The final four episodes will air over the next two Sundays.

QAnon, in case you are blissfully unaware, is a conspiracy theory revolving around statements made online by an anonymous person or group of persons called “Q”. QAnon believers think Q is a high-ranking insider who is working against a cabal of deep state power players involved in all sorts of nefarious activities up to and including cannibalism and pedophilia.

According to Q, Trump was meant to bring forth the revolutionary “storm” that would round up and eliminate all the baddies in the world.

On its surface, and as Q: Into the Storm reveals - beneath its surface too, QAnon is an embarrassingly inane exercise in intellectual dwarfism and infantile emotionalism.

Although, to be fair, as both a denizen of Hollywood and a lifelong Catholic, I can attest that powerful people conspiring to sexually prey upon children and cover it up isn’t exactly far-fetched. Throw in Jeffrey Epstein, with his elite client list and the rather improbable story surrounding his supposed suicide, and the notion of a cabal of sexual deviants ruling the world is certainly much less insane than the mainstream media would have us believe.

One can simply watch the documentary Who Took Johnny or read the The Franklin Cover-up (or try to watch the documentary Conspiracy of Silence), and the scales will quickly fall from their eyes regarding the uncomfortable truth about the levels of depravity in our world.

A major problem with Q: Into the Storm though is that fails to address this obvious context when contemplating the unasked question of why would people fall for this QAnon nonsense in the first place?

Belief in Q may be ludicrous but considering the context within which it came to be, it isn’t illogical. The elite media and the political establishment lie, brazenly and constantly about subjects both big and small, so embracing a conspiracy theory that recognizes that often avoided but obvious truth has a logic to it. But Q: Into the Storm never acknowledges that context, and that ultimately erodes the documentary’s credibility.

The main narrative device of the documentary is that it follows filmmaker Hoback as he delves into a sordid and strange cast of characters in search of who the real “Q” might be.

The first two episodes are like a walking tour of the Island of Misfit Toys, as the QAnon ecosystem is riddled with delusional desperados, one more bizarre than the next.

The documentary’s deepest dives in the first two episodes are into the history and drama behind QAnon’s various internet homes and the personalities, like Fredrick Brennan and Jim and Ron Watkins, that run them.

What is so disorienting about the documentary is that it portrays QAnon as this odious and ominous entity in the world yet sets a very whimsical tone for Hoback’s goofy global jaunt to find Q.

The mainstream media refer to QAnon as a cult, and they point to the riot, or as the establishment calls it - the “insurrection”, at the Capitol January 6th as evidence of how dangerous this belief system truly is.

The elite media’s fear and loathing of QAnon is so extreme that some critics are aghast that Q: Into the Storm had the temerity to actually let QAnon believers speak on camera, believing that putting a spotlight on the movement may spread the deadly infection of QAnon disinformation further. 

In the documentary QAnon is described as “part interactive game, part religion and part international movement”, and I think that is an accurate assessment, I also think it is an apt description of more establishment approved cults like Black Lives Matter and its unfalsifiable philosophy of Critical Race Theory.

Just as the delusional religion of QAnon led to the clown convention at the Capitol on Jan. 6th, the equally delusional religion of Black Lives Matter was the reason for our summer of “mostly peaceful protests” filled with rampant violence, looting and arson.

The reality is that QAnon is certainly an absurd conspiracy, but it is no more absurd than the ridiculous conspiracies the establishment adamantly propagates.

For example, are Q’s declarations any more crazy than Rachel Maddow’s nightly cavalcade of speculative anti-Russian conspiracy rants?

Are the QAnon kooks any more idiotic than the Maddow morons, Russiagate fantasists and the BLM brigade of buffoons?

No, they’re not. The reality is that these QAnon/BLM/Russiagate dupes, dopes and dipshits are all drinking the same brew of desperation, delusion and disinformation, just from different mugs.

QAnon, BLM and Russiagate exist as wish fulfillment apparatuses that tell their slavishly clueless congregations exactly what they want to hear and then leave it to the faithful to contort themselves in spectacular ways to assiduously make those fantasies into their reality.

The reality regarding Q: Into the Storm is that it thus far fails to be a worthy documentary mini-series because just like QAnon, it is merely vapid entertainment selling itself as a vehicle to truth, and ultimately is an exercise in confirmation bias meant to distract, not enlighten.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and murder stories, it is the state-sanctioned violence we ignore that is most corrosive

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has me questioning my choices in entertainment, but it’s the brutal actions of my government over the years that have done more to create a society desensitized to the value of life.

In the wake of the grisly murder of 33 year-old Sarah Everard in London earlier this month, there has been much debate about how to make women feel safer.

For example, the rather radical idea of a 6 p.m. curfew for men has been discussed. Considering that men stuck at home will just marinate in our morally twisted media which features a plethora of programming that highlights men killing women…that might not make women feel any safer.

Having just finished watching the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but wonder if the prevalence of such gruesome subject matter in our culture cheapens the sanctity of life and thereby inspires killers.

Our culture’s fascination with violent death can often intentionally or unintentionally transform into a celebration of people who kill. In our fame-obsessed, reality-tv world, being famous and infamous are now virtually synonymous, and it doesn’t matter how you get the spotlight, just that you do. By lavishing our attention on murdering monsters we often turn them into celebrities.

I’m not immune to the lurid appeal of a serial killer story, but it feels like a chicken and egg debate pondering if I watched the documentaries on the Night Stalker and the Yorkshire Ripper because Netflix made them or did Netflix make them because they knew I’d watch them?

The most interesting serial killer narratives are the ones that explore not so much the serial killers but our obsession with them.

For example, Zodiac is one of David Fincher’s best movies as it tells the true story of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who turns into an obsessive Zodiac Killer researcher. Fincher mining our fear of becoming obsessed with the Zodiac Killer rather than our fear of the Zodiac Killer is what makes the film so captivating.

Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter dives even deeper into that theme as it follows two FBI agents as they interview serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz and Charles Manson in order to try and understand how they think. Ultimately, the brilliance of the show is that it mirrors its audience by being obsessed with the minds of serial killers.

But does immersing oneself in the crimes and mindset of a killer do damage to our individual or collective psyche?

It is much too simplistic to argue tv shows and movies about serial killers transform men into murderers.

It’s more accurate to say that the moral guardrails of our culture, most notably religion, have so decayed and been so diminished, that there seems no counter-balance to the darker things that naturally intrigue us. In other words in our fallen world there is no flicker of illumination to give us respite from the relentless darkness.

These serial killer narratives once felt cathartic and even psychologically healthy when contained within a culture with clear moral and ethical boundaries that acknowledged the precious nature of life. Now that these moral and ethical boundaries have blurred, and the religious foundation for them has been removed or revealed to be fraudulent, these serial killer stories now feel much less cathartic and much more toxic.

The result of this is, as killer John Doe tells us in Fincher’s iconic Seven, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it is common, trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”

This is true of our culture as news and entertainment are inundated with murder, mayhem and depravity morning, noon and night.

Whether it’s scenes of attacks on Asians, or cops brutalizing civilians, or “mostly peaceful” violent protests, or documentaries on The Night Stalker or Nazis, we are perpetually force-fed a toxic media stew leaving our bellies bloated with bile and barbarity.

It is unimaginable that the culture’s consistent mantra of “if it bleeds it leads” is healthy, as it destabilizes the weak-minded, desensitizes us to the value of life and dehumanizes all of us.

Nearly a decade before the flag-waving pornography of the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign, Oliver Stone’s under appreciated Natural Born Killers (1994) skillfully explored this idea of a violent culture creating murderers and a malignant media transforming them into celebrities.

It is not surprising that a culture that made media sensations of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, celebrated more “respectable” serial killers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they unleashed their carnage.

It seems to me that the media’s glorification of the industrial scale, state sanctioned, military industrial complex murder machine does more to damage our collective psyche and diminish our sense of the preciousness of life than stories about lone murderers.  

I’m less worried about the psychological effects of a serial killer documentary than I am about America’s ambivalence regarding their war crimes committed in Yemen.

I’m less worried about Seven inspiring a lunatic than I am about the U.S. and U.K. killing people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

I’m less worried about Ted Bundy’s body count than I am about the body count of Bush, Blair, Obama, Trump and Biden.

The murder of Sarah Everard is a tragic symptom of the disease of indifference to the sanctity of life that ravages our culture. But the majority of blood on our collective hands is not just a result of watching too many serial killer movies but from turning a blind eye to the violence done in our name to innocent people across the globe.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Zack Snyder's Justice League: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An imperfect film, but if you like superhero movies, it’s worth the effort.

THE SNYDER CUT IS HERE AND IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT

After much consternation, speculation and hype…the eagerly anticipated Justice League “Snyder Cut” has finally premiered on HBO Max and I watched all four hours of it.

If you don’t know about the Snyder Cut then you’re probably a healthy human being living a normal life, but just to get you up to speed here are all the relevant details.

Zack Snyder, who has directed such notable hits as 300 and Watchmen, became the artistic force of the DC Comics cinematic universe in 2013 when he helmed Man of Steel, a reboot of the Superman origin story.

Snyder followed that up by directing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 and its sequel Justice League in 2017. Unfortunately, due to the sudden and tragic death of his daughter Autumn, Snyder had to drop out of post-production of Justice League, and was replaced by Joss Whedon.

Whedon, at the behest of the movie studio Warner Brothers, re-shot a lot of material and made substantial changes to the tone and tenor of Justice League in the editing process, thus obliterating Snyder’s original artistic vision.

When finally released in November of 2017, Whedon’s version of Justice League was panned by critics and performed poorly at the box office.

Ever since then rumors have swirled of a “Snyder cut” of Justice League which restored Zack Snyder’s original artistic vision. A group of hopeful fans started a movement, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, in order to pressure Warner Brothers to do just that and let the world see Snyder’s version of the film.

After years of hemming and hawing, Warner Brothers finally relented and agreed to release the Snyder Cut, and even gave Snyder a rumored extra $70 million to reshoot some scenes and re-edit.

The result of all of this is Zach Snyder’s Justice League, now streaming on HBO Max.

Let’s be clear, Zach Snyder’s Justice League isn’t Citizen Kane, nor is it a superhero masterpiece like The Dark Knight, but it is a thoroughly satisfying and entertaining DC superhero movie that is infinitely superior to Joss Whedon’s Justice League.

As the end credits role in the Snyder cut a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” plays, and it seemed very apropos considering the movie feels an answered prayer for long-suffering DC fans.

The greatest changes Snyder made to Justice League were restoring its dark theme and tone and doubling its running time from two hours to four hours.

Zack Snyder has always been much more a cinematic stylist than a proficient storyteller, and so giving him two extra hours to flesh out narratives and character arcs is enormously helpful.

The same was true with Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The theatrical release of that movie was two and a half hours, but Warner Brothers later released a directors cut titled “The Ultimate Edition”, that added an additional thirty minutes and it is a far superior, and much more dramatically and narratively coherent movie than the original theatrical version.

The Snyder Cut’s four hour running time may be a barrier to those ambivalent about superhero movies or with limited attention spans, but it adds much needed depth, context and coherence to the story and I found the movie to be surprisingly captivating the entire time.

Another noticeable and needed change Snyder made was in giving more time to Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and Ezra Miller’s Flash in order to flesh the characters out. Both Cyborg and Flash got short shrift in Whedon’s version and in the new cut they prove themselves to be very compelling characters.

That’s also true of villain Steppenwolf, which went from being a rather dull cardboard cutout in Whedon’s version to being a powerful and multi-dimensional character in Snyder’s cut. 

The newly added scenes with DC supervillain Darkseid also resonated, and elevated the film by giving added context.

The recent crop of DC films have often been maligned by critics and audiences for being too thematically dark, unlike the supremely successful Marvel films which are often fun and light fare.

Joss Whedon’s Justice League floundered though because it tried to bring Marvel frivolity to DC’s existentialism. To its great credit, the Snyder cut unabashedly embraces DC’s dark roots and shuns any Marvel imitation.

While Snyder is no Christopher Nolan, he is an accomplished cinematic stylist, and regardless of what you think of his style, it is unquestionably true that both Batman v Superman and Justice League were considerably improved when the entirety of his vision was allowed on screen.

When the suits at Warner Brothers have meddled with Snyder’s vision, his DC films have suffered critically and financially.

If Warner Brothers were smart they’d learn to leave the artists they’ve hired to direct their flagship properties alone, because those directors are better at making good movies than any suit pushing banality and conformity over artistry.

The next Batman movie, The Batman, is being directed by Matt Reeves, who is terrific, as evidenced by his two fantastic Planet of the Apes movies that were exquisite blockbusters. Reeves could help Warner Brothers and DC start fighting back against the Marvel behemoth, but only if they let him do his thing and don’t meddle and muddle things up like they’ve done with Snyder’s films.

As for Zach Snyder’s Justice League, it isn’t for everybody. It may be too long for some, or too dark for others, but despite being an imperfect film, it certainly hit a sweet spot for me.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

Last night I debased myself, as did millions of others, by watching the much-hyped Oprah Winfrey interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The fact that mindless proles like me tuned in to watch a billionaire interview two millionaires about how hard their life has been, is the most absurd thing imaginable. Yet here we are.

The sit-down in Santa Barbara was billed as a major scoop-fest as it was the first time that Meghan and Harry have spoken out since their very public spat and split from the royal family.

The British monarchy is the longest running soap opera in human history and no doubt millions tuned in last night hoping for some salacious details relating to the royal rift.

Unfortunately, this interview felt like when Geraldo Rivera opened up famed mobster Al Capone’s vault on live television and there was nothing in it. In this case, Oprah opened Meghan and Harry’s heads only to find a cavernous void.

This event was all sound and fury, signifying nothing, and felt more like a manufactured PR enterprise mixed with a high school gossip session rather than a journalistic endeavor.

The basic takeaway was that Harry and Meghan shamelessly threw the entire royal family under a double-decker bus in an attempt to play the victim and boost their woke credentials in Hollywood.

I am not a fan of the royal family…at all. I find them all to be arrogant aristocratic oligarchs, vicious colonialists and pompous, entitled in-bred buffoons. And yet my impressions from this interview are that Meghan is a self-serving, petulant, ambitious, adolescent, controlling, manipulative and abusive shrew that has successfully estranged her husband from his family. And that Harry is a royal eunuch whose masculine crown jewels are kept tightly locked up in Meghan’s purse.

Watching Harry and Meghan claim victimhood status was pretty amusing. Their bemoaning their perilous financial situation made me think of an episode of the British puppet show Spitting Image. In the episode Harry moves to LA and fails to find employment. He comes home to Meghan and cries, “I’ve tried every career there is - Prince and Hitler - and nothing has worked!”

Watching the two of them both claim that they simply saw no way out of the despair of royal life reminded me of a Simpsons episode where Ned Flander’s beatnik parents tell a child psychologist, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

People will either believe Meghan and Harry’s harsh yet egregiously unspecific accusations of the royal family’s cruelty, indifference, and racism, or they won’t. It would have been nice to have an interviewer who actually held their feet to the fire and put their claims under scrutiny to help viewers decide.

Oprah has always been more P.T. Barnum than Edward R. Murrow, and her patty cake “interview” with Meghan and Harry was all socially distanced hugs devoid of insight.

What was so frustrating was that there were ample opportunities for some actual truth to be revealed, but Oprah, who is not only friends but business partners with Harry and Meghan (they are co-producing an Apple TV documentary together about mental health which is currently on hold) never pressed the couple for answers when they were being evasive…which was often.

For instance, Harry and Meghan both claimed that a royal family member had raised concerns about the potentially dark skin tone of their then unborn child Archie.

Meghan demurred when Oprah asked who said it, and then when Harry was questioned he said he was “not comfortable sharing” the guilty party because it would be very damaging to them.

A real journalist would’ve pressed the issue and made clear that by refusing to name the person who allegedly said it, Harry and Meghan should be assumed to be making the story up.

Racism was brought up numerous times throughout, most notably in regards to the British tabloids mistreatment of Meghan. Harry and Meghan claim, and Oprah obviously agrees, that the only reason the tabloids picked on Meghan was because she is of “mixed race”.

The problem with this accusation and assumption is that there is strong evidence to the contrary which was brought up in the interview. Namely, Harry voiced his concern that what the tabloids did to his mother Diana would happen to Meghan. The tabloids savaged Diana. They did the same to Charles and Camilla and virtually any and all major players in the royal family. The tabloids are awful…to everyone, not just “mixed race” royals who are Americans, actresses and divorcees.

 It seems quite obvious that what has happened with the royal family is that Harry and Meghan wanted special treatment while everyone else thought it strange that they should be treated any different than any other royal, who all had their time in the unpleasant tabloid barrel.

What I find endlessly amusing is that Meghan and Harry wanted out of this scorching spotlight, so in search of the simple life they moved to…Hollywood, and set up a production company and signed deals with Netflix and Spotify and did a much hyped interview with Oprah. They just replaced one delusional cesspool for another, albeit sunnier, one.

If Meghan and Harry are tired of the drama, why do the interview in the first place. They weren’t setting the record straight talking to Oprah, they were trying to settle some scores, and that will no doubt only lead to more tabloid drama.

The royal family is a walking tourist trap because it is a reality tv show, and so the vacuous drama is completely the point. Without the endless, mindless, manufactured Sturm und Drang, the royal family, including Harry and Meghan, are entirely irrelevant. And that can never be allowed to happen…and so this Harry and Meghan interview is just another episode in the relentless soap opera known as the House of Windsor. Tune in next week for the royal response to all the scandalous allegations!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Mauritanian: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A great story but not so great movie. Not worth paying to see but its subject matter is crucially important and makes the film worthy of a watch when it becomes available on a streaming service for free.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, tells the true story of Mohamedou Salahi, who in the wake of 9-11 was tortured and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years without charge.

The film, which as of March 2nd is in theaters and available on Video-On-Demand, is adapted from Salahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary, and stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodly and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Mauritanian is a great story, but unfortunately not a particularly great film. Despite some effective moments, particularly the torture sequences, and a solid performance from Tahar Rahim as Salahi, it’s a mediocrity that’s not nearly as good as I wanted it to be or that it needed to be. One can’t help but wonder what a better director could have done with such dramatically potent material.

The film suffers because it looks like a tv movie. This rather flat and dull aesthetic keeps the story dramatically constrained and so we are never drawn into it.

The performances are equally middling, with the lone exception being Rahim, who plays the riddle that is Sahir with a charm and humanity worthy of note.

Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for her work as a defense attorney Nancy Hollander in the film but I found her performance to be rather banal. Shailene Woodley gives an equally lackluster performance as another lawyer Teri Duncan.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Marine Corps lawyer Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who was assigned to be the prosecutor on Sahir’s case. Cumberbatch deploys a Southern accent to his Couch (who is a real person) and it is egregiously awful. When British actors miss on American accents, particularly New York and Southern accents, it is so mannered and lifeless as to be painfully distracting, and Cumberbatch’s butchering of the dialect is gruesome to behold. As I watched Cumberbatch lose his wrestling match with the Southern drawl I couldn’t help but wonder…were there no American actors available to play this part?

That said, while the movie isn’t worth paying $20 to see On Demand, I still recommend The Mauritanian when it becomes available for free if for no other reason than it is an important story that contains some vital lessons for our current turbulent time.

As Orwell taught us, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”, and in the United States of Amnesia, our prodigiously propagandized populace is conditioned to be myopic in the moment and utterly blind to the past. This makes for a pliable citizenry that can be led around by their noses by a mainstream media designed to do just that. This is heightened by gullible Americans lacking the intellectual vim and vigor to swim against the powerful current of establishment narratives in a search for some semblance of truth.

Thankfully The Mauritanian is at least a visual aid to remind America of that which it is consistently capable, namely, brutal authoritarianism fueled by frantic emotionalism.

The film does a service by reminding viewers of a few critical things.

First that Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and people still languish there, despite Obama’s promises to close it when he became president in 2009.

Second, that al-Qeada and the U.S. were allies in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It doesn’t get into great detail or anything, but even that little bit of information might be shocking to those who’ve conveniently forgotten that fact (or never knew it in the first place) and other much more damning facts about America and al-Qaeda’s fruitful relationship, then and now.

And third, that war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Barrack Obama, and their immoral minions, have never been punished for their atrocities, which is an abomination considering those that exposed their crimes, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, rot in prison or are forced to live in exile.

As The Mauritanian highlights, post 9-11 America went into a full-blown hysteria. The result of this hysteria was the Patriot Act, massive surveillance, rendition, torture and the mass murder and mayhem of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 America has only gotten more hysterical in the following two decades. In recent years we’ve had one mindless panic after another. There’s been the Russia panic, the #MeToo panic, and the racism/white supremacy panic…all of them delusions and illusions built on minimal evidence and fueled by irrationalism and self-righteous fanaticism.

These panics have been used to distort reality and manipulate people into fighting for draconian and totalitarian measures to combat them.

The most alarming hysteria is the new “domestic terrorism” panic that sprung up in the wake of the Q-Anon Capitol riot of January 6th.

In reaction to this Q-Anon clownshow the political establishment and media have gone full Spinal Tap and upped the hyperbole to 11…9-11 that is.

The delusional discourse that the Capitol riot was a 9-11 level event has led to politicians demanding a “9-11 Commission” type of investigation. I wonder if the new Q-Anon Commission, maybe headed by the new “Reality Czar”, will be as toothless as the contrived show trial that was the 9-11 Commission?

Watching The Mauritanian I couldn’t help but think that Washington and the mainstream media want to do to troublesome “conspiracy theorists”, traditionalists, Christians and Trumpists what Bush, Obama and company did to Mamadou Salahi…make them suffer and disappear. Unfortunately, many regular liberals who have either sold their souls or lost their minds, moral compass and way after years of being heavily propagandized and indoctrinated, wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.

This furor and frenzy over “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacy” is inversely proportional to the actual threat from these manufactured shadows dancing upon America’s cave wall. 

9-11 was a savage and heinous attack, but the U.S.’s over reaction to it brutalized innocent people and ended up transforming the brush fire of Islamic radicalism it was meant to extinguish into an inferno that engulfed the world and torched the Constitution. It seems very likely that a similar over-reaction to the Capitol Riot will result in the same counter conflagration on American soil, and the phantom threat of “right-wing radicals” and “white supremacists” will thus be made manifest.

In conclusion, The Mauritanian isn’t great but is worth watching because it serves a noble purpose, which is to remind Americans of their unquenchable thirst to demonize and dehumanize those they deem as terrorists. Though the targets are now different, America’s evil impulse is as powerful as ever, and so is its susceptibility to hysteria and rampant emotionalism…and that portends a terrifyingly dark future indeed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Asinine and the Absurd 78th Annual Golden Globes Awards

Hollywood once again proved itself to be the moral authority of our time when a bevy of stars took to the stage Sunday night at the 78th annual Golden Globes Awards to rail against President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional, murderous air strikes in Syria, his caging of illegal immigrant kids, and his failure to fight for a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All and a $2,000 stimulus check during this calamitous coronavirus lockdown.

Just kidding.

With the bad orange man gone from the White House it was back to Hollywood business as usual at the painfully lackluster, socially-distanced Golden Globes where there was a lot of performative virtue signaling regarding diversity but no actual political courage on display.

The Golden Globes have long been a running joke as the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), a collection of 89 “foreign entertainment journalists” who vote on the awards, notoriously care less about artistic quality than lining their pockets, corporate swag and basking in star power.

The L.A. Times recently did a searing investigation of the organization and, shock of shocks, found them to be corrupt…I think Captain Obvious was the reporter who broke the story. 

Hollywood’s big takeaway from the L.A. Times story though was that the HFPA is racist because it has no black members.

This was highlighted throughout last night’s show as flaccid comedy duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as numerous presenters, made snide comments about the racial “scandal”. This led to one of the more riotously funny moments when an Indian woman and Turkish man who are members of the HFPA had to grovel on live tv about how bad they were for not having black people in their group. Diversity!

Ironically, after all the bemoaning of HFPA racism the three of the first four awards given out went to black actors, Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah and John Boyega for Small Axe, and to the first black led Pixar film Soul.

Later in the night the Best Actor and Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama awards also went to black artists, the late Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Stupid Golden Globes can’t even stay on brand when it comes to their own racism.

One of the few bright spots in previous Golden Globes has been comedian Ricky Gervais serving as ornery host. Gervais’ scathing opening monologues at the Globes are some of the best comedy of recent years. Never one to pander or genuflect to his star-studded and empty-headed live audience, Gervais instead consistently eviscerated the cavalcade of self-satisfied and self-righteous stars luxuriously partying before him.

Unfortunately, this year Gervais wasn’t hosting so instead of his uncomfortably honest and gloriously cutting comedy we were stuck with the insipid nice girl comedy of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Another redeeming quality of the past Golden Globes awards has been watching celebrities get drunk at the dinner party style affair. Sadly, this year’s show was “socially distanced” so random shots of sloppy drunk celebs were replaced with awkward moments on zoom. .

Sans Gervais and drunk celebs the Golden Globes were reduced to being nothing but a handing out of awards no one, even the people winning them actually care about.

Besides the endless babbling about diversity and inclusion, the political talk was pretty minimal. Sure, Borat made some stale Trump and Giuliani jokes, and Mark Ruffalo bemoaned the “hideous dark storm” of Trump “we’ve been living through” and Aaron Sorkin mentioned democracy being under siege, but that was about it.

What is so striking is there were ample opportunities for Hollywood heavyweights to speak up about current issues, but they refused.

Sean Penn, one of my favorite actors and activists, was there, and besides looking like Moe from the Three Stooges, he didn’t do much of anything except display a shocking lack of testicular fortitude. He could’ve spoken up about Biden’s illegal attack on Syria, like he had done about the Iraq War…but he didn’t.

Jodie Foster won best Supporting Actress for her work in the film The Mauritanian, a movie about the injustice of a prisoner held in Guantanamo Bay for fourteen years without charge. But Foster never mentioned Guantanamo Bay, injustice or the immorality of the War on Terror in her acceptance speech.

Famed anti-war activist Jane Fonda, who once went to North Vietnam while the U.S. was at war with them, was awarded a lifetime achievement award but never mentioned Biden’s illegal airstrikes in Syria, or his support of murderous tyrant Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the continuation of the “kids in cages” immigration policy. She instead just regurgitated the usual woke pablum of diversity and inclusion.

Chloe Zhao won best director and best drama for her film Nomadland, which examines those crushed under the boot of American capitalism. Yet she never once mentioned Biden’s failure to push for the $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All or a coronavirus stimulus check which he promised, three things which would immeasurably help the suffering people featured in her film.

With Trump gone and the corpse of Joe Biden being the one obliterating Syrians and caging kids at the border, Hollywood elites are now all too happy to lose their stridently socially conscious rhetoric in favor of status quo cheerleading and social justice ass-kissing.

In 2017 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election Meryl Streep “bravely” spoke out in defense of immigrants at the Globes, which was curious since she had been completely silent during the previous 8 years when Obama set deportation records and put “kids in cages”.

It seems Hollywood is following in Queen Meryl’s faux-noble footsteps by deciding to stay quiet now when speaking up would take courage.

Everyone knows Hollywood is not exactly filled with the bravest souls that are driven purely by integrity and their commitment to principle. But the amount of self-righteousness mixed with craven cowardice on display at the Golden Globes last night was remarkable even by Hollywood’s depraved standards.

In conclusion, if the Golden Globes are any indication, awards season is going to be filled with the most venal, vacuous and vapid posing and preening imaginable, but it won’t feature any principled protests against Biden administration policies, no matter how abhorrent they may be.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Woody Allen: Pervert, Pedophile and Shitty Director

Allen v. Farrow is the compelling new HBO docu-series thatexposes Woody Allen’s disgustingly depraved dirty laundry.

The first episode of the four part series lays the damning groundwork that shows Woody Allen is a sick and twisted individual.

Allen v. Farrow is the explosive four part HBO documentary series that explores the claims that four-time Academy Award winner Woody Allen molested his and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan when she was a small child.

The first episode of the series premiered on Sunday night on HBO and the streaming service HBO Max and it is very captivating viewing.

If you are looking for a documentary to disabuse yourself of the notion that Woody Allen is a twisted individual and a child molester, then Allen v. Farrow is not the documentary series for you.

The series thus far has masterfully laid a damning foundation for the case against Woody Allen, who did not cooperate with the filmmakers. Allen comes across in the admittedly one-sided docu-series as a creepy, controlling and narcissistic person who has an inappropriately affectionate and unnatural attachment to the young Dylan.

The first episode uses interviews with Dylan, her brother Ronan and mother Mia Farrow, as well as various eyewitness accounts from family friends to build as compelling argument for Allen’s guilt.

The case against Allen is, of course, complicated by the fact that Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow, is a woman scorned by Woody Allen, so she might be inclined, out of spite, to project onto him a malevolence that isn’t really there. But the major caveat to that notion is one of the most revelatory and damning pieces of evidence against Woody Allen…namely that he was cheating on Mia WITH HER ADOPTED DAUGHTER SOON-YI!

Allen, 85, and Soon-Yi, now his wife, have dismissed the docuseries as a “hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”. In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter magazine, the disgraced director and his wife said filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick “had no interest in the truth,” and accused them of “collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers,” and giving Allen only a “matter of days” to respond to the allegations.

But let’s face facts, even if Dylan Farrow never made allegations of sexual molestation against Woody Allen, he should still be labeled a pervert. The idea that Allen thought it was normal and natural to start a sexual relationship with his barely out-of-her-teens, de facto stepdaughter speaks volumes to his depravity and degeneracy.

It is striking that Woody Allen’s shameless debauchery in regards to Soon-Yi, and the damning allegations made by Dylan, never slowed down his career.

Allen’s uninterrupted career success is revelatory regarding the levels of sycophancy in Hollywood. Remarkably, Allen has made a film a year since 1992, getting some of Hollywood’s biggest stars to work with him.

Cate Blanchett, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Sally Hawkins, Mira Sorvino, Adrian Brody, Colin Ferrell, Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder among many others have worked with Woody post Soon-Yi revelations and Dylan accusations.

The appeal of Woody Allen to Hollywood stars is that working with him greatly increases the chance at an Oscar…which is pretty damning of both the ambitious actors and actresses who’ve worked with him and also the Academy Awards and their decidedly bad taste in movies.

I have never understood Woody Allen’s appeal. I’m one of the rarest of creatures in that I am the most devout of cinephiles yet I’ve always found Woody Allen’s films to be utterly pedestrian affairs at best.

Even before the allegations of child sexual abuse made by Dylan Farrow and the Soon Yi relationship became public in 1992, I thought Woody Allen was a pedantic, vapid, vacuous and pompous cinematic poseur.

Many people often say to me that they love Woody Allen films, most especially Annie Hall, but I always feel like they’re saying that because they think they’re supposed to say it. Saying you love Woody Allen films is like some secret handshake that signals that you’re an intellectual or something.

Allen’s feminine, nebbishy and effete, ‘man without a chest’ persona and the elite, upper-crust New York he inhabited, were anathema to me, a working class Irish Catholic kid from Brooklyn. I recognized my New York and my New York family when I watched Scorsese, most notably Goodfellas, not Woody Allen.

Woody Allen is the Adam Sandler of coastal elites and critics only adore him because they look like him and are just as chestless, feminine, effete and nebbishy as he is.

In an attempt to try and “get” Woody Allen, I watched his entire filmography over again about 7 years ago. It did nothing to dissuade me from my negative opinion of his middling, and frankly middlebrow, movie making, and did much to further convince me of his deviancy.

The most obviously uncomfortable piece of cinematic evidence against Allen is the 1979 movie Manhattan, where he, a 42-year-old, dates a 17-year-old girl, an uncomfortable bit of foreshadowing to the Soon-Yi situation.

As someone who prefers to separate the artist’s personal life from their art, and who prefers skepticism to #MeToo-ism, Woody Allen is the exception to my rule.

Watching Allen v. Farrow may be jarring to someone who is a fan of Woody Allen, but by now if people are defending Woody Allen they are so delusional and morally pliable as to be ridiculous.

It is important to note though that it’s possible to both think Woody Allen is a monster that molested his daughter but also enjoy his films. For instance, I am capable of watching and liking Roman Polanski movies knowing full well his history of sexual deviancy. Chinatown is still unquestionably one of the best films ever made regardless of Polanski’s crimes.

The biggest difference between Polanski and Allen though is that Polanski is a brilliant artist who was imprisoned and went into self-imposed exile for his crime, while Woody Allen is a pretentious hack who has never been held to account for his repugnant misdeeds.

In conclusion, Allen v. Farrow is a compelling piece of documentary television. I’m looking forward to watching the next three episodes, and to never watching those insipid Woody Allen films ever again.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Nomadland: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An exquisitely crafted film that boasts a powerful yet grounded performance from Frances McDormand.

Oscar front-runner Nomadland chronicles the working class despair wrought by American capitalism, but still manages to kiss Amazon’s ass.

The film gives a gritty glimpse into the struggle of the working poor but genuflects to corporate power instead of exposing it.

Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and written and directed by Chloe Zhao, tells the story of Fern, an older woman who lives in a van and survives as a seasonal worker in various locales across America.

The film, which is currently in theatres and streaming on Hulu, is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century and uses some of the real people from the book to play themselves in the movie.

Nomadland is fantastic and an Oscar front-runner, but it’s not for everybody as it’s an arthouse, verite style film with a loose narrative structure that lacks predictable dramatic beats. It is less a straightforward story than it is a melancholy and mournful meditation.

It is the topic of that meditation - American capitalism, impermanence and grief that makes Nomadland such an intriguing piece of cinema.

The story begins with Fern being forced to leave her long time residence in Empire, Nevada after the town’s US Gypsum plant closes and the once bustling area is abandoned.

Fern then takes to the road to run from her grief over losing Empire and her husband and travels throughout the west searching for seasonal employment.

She makes friends with fellow travelers, all suffering in similar circumstances, as she lives out of her van while working menial jobs in Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Chloe Zhao’s deft directorial touch gives the film a looser pace which results in a narrative with great space to breath. Zhao allows space, silence, framing, lighting and a very effective soundtrack work in unison to finely cultivate the drama instead of imposing it upon viewers.

The sense of isolation and desperation felt by Fern is heightened by cinematographer Joshua James Richards’ gorgeous panoramic shots of the vast and beautifully bleak western landscape.

Like the desolate landscapes, the deep lines in McDormand’s gloriously cinematic face also tell the story of all the hardships and heartbreaks throughout the years that have brought Fern and her working class kind to the brink of extinction.

Speaking of extinction, the film repeatedly refers to dinosaurs, and the sub-text is clear, the meteor of globalization, financialization and anti-unionism has hit and Fern and the working class in America are dinosaurs destined to aimlessly walk the darkened earth searching for scraps until they drop dead from exhaustion.

The film also frequently references carnivores, the symbolism of which is that American capitalism eats up and spits out working class people like Fern. In one scene Fern is horrified watching a crocodile in a zoo devour skinned rabbits for lunch, her primordial horror is driven by the fact that American capitalism is the crocodile, and she and all the poor people she loves are the rabbits.

Fern and her friends all bought into the lie that is the American dream, and now they find themselves older with dwindling energy and resources, alone and vulnerable living out the American nightmare. They’ve worked hard their whole lives and have nothing to show for it except for the existential terror of life without any safety net.

Despite the finely crafted filmmaking, McDormand’s powerfully grounded performance and the film’s chronicling of the wandering underclass and rightfully bemoaning the Titanic-esque economic state of America, it disappoints because it refuses to name or chastise the corporate villains hiding in plain sight.

For example, Fern works every Christmas season at an Amazon warehouse. The film actually got permission to shoot in a real Amazon fulfillment center, and that undoubtedly compromised its integrity.

The Amazon related scenes seem as if they were scripted by the company’s human resources and marketing departments as they’re basically shameless ads for the corporate behemoth.

Fern is shown leisurely meandering down vast warehouse walkways smiling and waving to other employees, and having fun in the break room with new friends, and telling others about how much money she makes and how the company covers the cost of her long-term van parking while she is an employee. The reality of employment at Amazon is much different, as the union busting, worker exploiting Bezos beast brutally cracks the whip on its employees like a frantic pharaoh building a pyramid one box at a time.

On its surface Nomadland is a descendant of the Sean Penn directed film Into the Wild and John Ford’s famed adaptation of Steinbeck’s working class masterpiece Grapes of Wrath.

Fern is somewhat a cross between Into the Wild’s free-spirited protagonist Alexander Supertramp and The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad. The problem though, as highlighted by Nomadland’s shameless acquiescence to Amazon, is that Fern is Supertramp without spirit and Joad without spine.

Maybe the film’s lack of testicular fortitude in regards to Amazon is just another piece of sub-text, surreptitiously alerting viewers that the real problem is the modern demonization of masculinity and the feminization of America. In this way Fern is a castrated Tom Joad, not only unable, but unwilling, to fight against oppressors, instead preferring to collaborate in her own exploitation and denigration. 

More likely though is that the film’s Amazon ass-kissing is a function of that corporate monstrosity’s massive influence over Hollywood. Amazon is now a major movie and tv studio, and the suck ups and sycophants in Hollywood know that to get on Amazon’s bad side is a potentially fatal career move…so they pucker up and play act at caring about working class concerns rather than actually doing something about them.

Nomadland will probably win a bunch of well-deserved Oscars, but unfortunately the film is The Grapes of Wrath without the wrath, as it ultimately genuflects to the corporate power that created the working class tragedy it masterfully chronicles.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amend: The Fight for America: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

‘Amend: The Fight for America’, Netflix’s new painfully woke docu-series, is only interested in indoctrinating, not educating

The series is a ludicrous exercise in politically correct performance art that is allergic to intellectual seriousness or nuance.

Amend: The Fight for America, is the new Netflix docu-series hosted by Will Smith that examines the history and impact of the 14th Amendment, which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law.

The series is broken down into six episodes. The first three episodes cover the 14th Amendment in relation to the black struggle for equality from slavery to Black Lives Matter, while episodes 4, 5 and 6 focus on the women’s movement, marriage equality/gay rights and immigrant rights respectively.

The docu-series is a high-end public service announcement featuring stars such as Pedro Pascal, Mahershala Ali and Joseph Gordon Levitt, and is obviously meant as a teaching guide for children and teenagers.

One of the big problems with Amend though, and there are many of them, is that it presents itself as a serious work of history, but is really just a blatant work of advocacy.

There is nothing wrong with advocating, but doing it under the guise of teaching history, makes Amend an insidious piece of propaganda.

As propaganda it is very slick as it has all the trappings of a serious historical documentary, but it’s violently allergic to nuance. The series’ shameless embrace of woke identity politics is never countenanced with even a rudimentary glimpse of oppositional ideas and beliefs except to label them as obviously and irredeemably evil.

For instance, in the episode about women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), anti-abortion beliefs are only seen as tools of misogyny and the patriarchy, and the potentially rich and fascinating topic of the clash of 14th Amendment rights of the unborn child versus those of the pregnant woman is never broached.

The series’ intellectual petulance is also highlighted in this episode when one of the talking heads is incapable of even saying famed ERA opposition leader Phyllis Schlafly’s name. She stumbles over it numerous times and then finally gives up only to be quickly replaced by another talking head who simply calls Ms. Schlafly, “Mean Phyllis”. Apparently in an attempt to appeal to grade school children the docu-series decided to act like a grade school child.

Preferring this slavishly woke, blindly Manichean perspective on every issue guts the project of any intellectual seriousness, and its relentlessly self-righteous snickering at opposing arguments cheapens the project and transforms it from being potentially laudable to ridiculously laughable.

Speaking of laughable, Amend’s credibility is further damaged by “comedian” Larry Wilmore. Wilmore, a producer on the series, keeps showing up to mug for the camera for no discernible reason and is so tonally out of place as to be painful. Wilmore’s “comedy” is always impotent and grating, but in Amend his shtick is even more insipidly limp and irritating due to the supposedly serious context.

The docu-series is obsessed with narratives and messaging, as it repeatedly talks about the evil of  “messages of fear and hate” from small-minded bigots used to rile the masses. Trump is repeatedly conjured in this context to accentuate the point.  This is curious since the series espouses its own message of fear and hate by continually denigrating “white men” and ringing the alarm bells over the boogey man of  “white supremacy” which is supposedly lurking under every bed and around every corner.

This anti-white attitude is evident when the over 300,000 white men who died to free the slaves in the Civil War are studiously ignored, but the black soldiers who fought are celebrated. It’s also evident when minority actors Pedro Pascal and Graham Greene play Lincoln and Ohio Senator John Bingham, the principle founder of the 14th Amendment, respectively yet white actor Joseph Gordon Leavitt plays the villainous, N-word spouting Andrew Johnson.

Another telling moment that spotlights the series’ manipulative mendacity and deceptive intentions is when activist Britney Packnett Cunningham recounts her experiences as a protestor in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the 2014 shooting of black man Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. 

Video and photos of protestors fill the screen as Ms. Cunningham states “the call on the streets was ‘hands up don’t shoot’ because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him”.

This is an intentionally misleading statement as Ms. Cunningham, who is featured throughout the series as some kind of expert, knows it isn’t true and that she is perpetuating the false narrative surrounding Brown’s shooting, that’s why she couches it with “we were being told”. Brown didn’t have his hands up when Wilson shot him and yet Ms. Cunningham and Amend prefer that lie because it fits their narrative instead of the truth that destroys it. (Watch an infinitely more insightful documentary, What Killed Michael Brown? for the truth.)

If you like deceptive docu-series that indoctrinate instead of educate, and enjoy watching solemn faced actors babbling about “inclusivity” while pushing so hard to conjure non-existent gravitas it seems like they could soil themselves at any moment…then Amend is definitely for you.

After suffering though all six hours of Amend: The Fight for America, my biggest takeaway is that we need a new constitutional amendment to protect me from the torture of watching the vapid Will Smith mimic sincerity while spouting woke talking points as if they’re holy decrees from God on high. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021